PORTLAND, Ore. (KATU) — The 1803 Fund, which invests in Portland’s Black neighborhoods, announced nearly $70 million in real estate investments set to reshape Albina, “marking one of the largest place-based commitments to prosperity and cultural renewal in Oregon’s history,” the organization said.
KATU caught up with Bettye Dukes-Elegan at her home that she’s owned for decades in the historic Black Albina neighborhood.
“I grew up here in the 50s and 60s,” she said. “I can remember when Lloyd Center opened and Safeway and all the stores and everything opened up, and it was just beautiful.”
Dukes-Elegan watched the area change with more people moving in and some parts considered “bland.”
However, that is slowly changing as 1803 Fund’s investment includes the purchase of the former Louis Dreyfus Co. grain silos terminal on the Willamette River north of the Steel Bridge.
The 1803 Fund said the site will offer intentional spaces for creative expression and intellectual activity.
In February, Albina Vision Trust, a nonprofit leading the effort to restore Albina, announced plans for a waterfront park at the same location west of the Moda Center.
“A big part of our purpose as an organization is to reconnect East Portland to the Willamette River, to the Waterfront. And we see really the space between the Broadway and the Steel bridges as an ideal location for the largest waterfront park on the east side of the Willamette,” JT Flowers, with the Albina Vision Trust, told KATU at the time.
Another site includes the adjacent historic district once known as “The Low End,” south of the Fremont Bridge and west of Interstate 5. It will be revitalized into a mixed-use neighborhood centered on culture, creativity and learning.
“I think it’ll really lighten up and brighten up the neighborhood down there,” Dukes-Elegan said.
Together, these sites comprise over seven acres that will anchor a generational effort to restore Albina as a center of creativity and learning. They are projected to generate hundreds of jobs and nearly $700 million in economic impact to the Portland-metro area in the initial phases.
“It’ll give people some place extra to go, especially since a lot of people with children are moving back into this neighborhood,” Dukes-Elegan told KATU’s Victor Park.
“These are thousand-year investments,” said Rukaiyah Adams, CEO of 1803 Fund. “We are investing in Albina not as an artifact of the past, but as a promise to the future. Our goal is to build something enduring, grounded in the people who have always called this neighborhood home.”
All this is part of a larger effort to restore the community where many, mostly Black Portlanders, were forced out to make way for I-5 in the mid-1900s.
Dukes-Elegan was one of the few to return when it was affordable.
Now, these investments are bringing hope, but for Dukes-Elegan, it will never be the same.
“When I say it’ll never be what it was, it also has to do with the fact that it’s now very unaffordable to a lot of people,” she said.
A press event is scheduled for the first week of December when organizers say 1803 Fund will unveil renderings.
